The US authorities have declassified a number of documents containing talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and then-US President George W. Bush in which they discussed the situation in Chechnya.
The talks took place between 2001 and 2003.
Their transcripts were published by the US National Security Archive. A key document concerns a conversation held on 21 October 2001 — just over a month after the 11 September terrorist attacks and during the Second Chechen War.
In the document, Bush reminded Putin of previous discussions and said that, in his view, Russia should give ‘moderate Chechens’ a chance to get rid of radical groups ‘such as al Qaeda’. By ‘moderate Chechens’, the US president, as follows from the context of the transcript, was referring to the circle around Aslan Maskhadov — at that time the president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, fighting for its independence against Russia.
Putin replied that, in his assessment, Maskhadov did not have real influence. According to the Russian president, there were ‘only 200–300 people’ around Maskhadov, and although he allegedly listened to calls from the US State Department to ‘get rid of Arab terrorists’, he did not have the strength or resources to do so. Putin claimed that Maskhadov had no one to rely on.
During the conversation, Bush directly asked Putin whether he considered all Chechens to be terrorists. The Russian president answered in the negative, but claimed that ‘all fighters’ were terrorists. The transcript records Putin’s assertion that these fighters had allegedly been trained by Osama bin Laden and that they ‘even look the same as him’. Putin also stated that, in his view, it was bin Laden who gave orders to carry out terrorist attacks against civilians on Russian territory.
The declassified documents also include other statements by Putin in which he links Chechen fighters to the international jihadist movement. In particular, he claimed that ‘these people who work with al-Qaeda and bin Laden’ allegedly said that they were ‘tired of killing Ivans’, and therefore wanted to go to Afghanistan ‘to kill fat Americans there’, and then return to Chechnya.
A separate part of the conversation was devoted to the historical context of the conflict. Putin said that he ‘knows the history of Chechnya’ and described it as a ‘400-year problem’. He noted that the Chechen people had always, in his words, sought independence.
‘We must treat this with respect, however today this is impossible’, the transcript says.
Putin also recalled that, in his view, Russia ‘completely withdrew’ from Chechnya in 1995 and effectively gave it independence, informally. According to him, the consequences of this step were expressed in the rise of ‘radical Islam’.
Putin linked the solution to the problem of radicalisation in Chechnya to the displacement of radical Islam by traditional religious institutions. In the conversation with Bush, he said that Russia supported ‘traditional Islam’, with which the authorities have ‘good relations’. At the same time, Putin acknowledged that Russian troops ‘sometimes commit crimes’, but added that the authorities ‘take measures’. In this context, he urged the US ‘not to interfere’ in the situation.
At the end of the conversation, Putin raised the issue of Georgia and accused the president of the country at the time, Eduard Shevardnadze, of either acquiescence or an inability to control the situation in Georgia, claiming that Chechen fighters had set up around 1,500 paramilitary camps on Georgian territory.
OC Media
